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The Obama fiscal 2015 budget that was released yesterday was already on its way to fiscal oblivion before the events in and about Ukraine forced the American media to put its resources elsewhere. But yesterday's Ukraine-related news let out what little air was in the Obama budget balloon story and reduced the coverage even further. I've been involved with the federal budget since the mid-1970s and I have never seen a president's budget be so insignificant a national story as what happened yesterday with the Obama 2015 plan.

Part of this was, of course, inadvertent. There was no way for the White House to know months ago when it planned the release date for its budget that Ukraine would happen at the same time.

But part of it was also intentional. As I posted several days ago, the way the administration released this year's budget was virtually guaranteed to severely limit the attention it received even if nothing else newsworthy was happening. Add the events in Ukraine to the mix and it's not at all surprising that the Obama fiscal 2015 budget not only didn't lead the news yesterday, it received only minimal attention.

The are three reasons why the White House may not be all that unhappy about the attention its budget received.

The first is that it seems clear that the White House believes nothing is going to happen this year on the budget in Washington. There will be no grand bargain, no small bargain and virtually no substantive discussions. As a result, White House obviously thought it made little sense to propose a budget that took the process seriously and included politically difficult tax and spending proposals that would be rejected out of hand and would hurt Democrats in the elections this November.

The second is that there is nothing the White House could have proposed that would have changed this situation. Based on what happened...or, really, what didn't happen...last year on the budget when the president did propose significant changes in mandatory programs, offering push-the-envelope proposals this year absolutely would not (as in no way, no how, ain't gonna happen) get congressional Republicans to reciprocate even modestly. The president was going to be criticized by the GOP even if he proposed the budget resolution put together last year by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

The Obama administration was criticized for not proposing more. But that criticism came mostly from those who would have criticized specific proposals even more for either being too aggressive or not aggressive enough. In the current hyper-partisan inside-the-beltway environment, it's not hard to understand why the White House chose to be criticized about the process -- which is far less relevant and of concern to most people -- than about the proposals that would have riled particular groups even though they had no chance whatsoever of being adopted.